Ideuhs are incipient thoughts

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December 04, 2010

Ever since I picked up Sato Kashiwa's book Creative Thinking in a Japanese bookstore last summer, I've been fascinated by how effortlessly he seems to come up with amazing ideas for his clients. If you check out his portfolio site, you'll be amazed at the variety of his work, but what's just as amazing, the more I read about him, is the disciplined and, for lack of a better word, almost logical way he seems to arrive at breakthrough work.

I've summarized the first five of Sato's suggestions around the power of questions and visualization in getting to the root of the problems you're trying to solve, and more effectively communicating your ideas. Since then I've had my own creative challenges, and have put these principles to work, with good effect. For example, I recently won a project for Intel, after the client mentioned she liked the way I questioned her. But it's the sixth technique that I now find most fascinating, and the one that I have yet to put into practice. I'm hoping that writing about it will make it happen, because the one thing I've discovered about blogging is that it's a great way to get ideas to stick in my own head.

When you need to communicate your ideas - either visually or verbally - Sato writes, you can't have too many means of expression at your disposal. With a rich supply of expression, you can convey fresher and more accurate images to your client. And the storehouse of expression, Sato says, is memory. In other words, full self-expression can be helped by greater development and control of your memory, the ability to call up accurate expressions from memory at will.

Sato's solution is to make a habit of tagging the things you experience. Tagging is putting a label on the things that catch your attention, and consciously filing those associations in memory. Just like tagging blogs and web pages raises their search rankings, Sato's idea is that tagging perceptions increases your chances of calling them from memory later. It transforms memory into a search engine.

A good example is Sato's package design for Japanese cosmetics brand Lissage. While a premium brand in Japan, one of Lissage's issues was that it wasn't as well known as it should have been for its advanced skincare technologies. When examining the pump bottle for Lissage's Skin Maintenizer serum, he had the idea of introducing a trigger mechanism. Triggers require less force than pumps, but because they have a functional appearance reminiscent of household cleansing products, they weren't used in cosmetics. Nevertheless, Sato was intrigued by the possibilities of creating an elegant trigger package that would convey functionality and beauty at the same time. Where did he get this idea?

Some time before, Sato had been shopping for a suit in Paris when he noticed a chrome-plated fire extinguisher in the store. He was impressed by how the plating completely transformed a functional object into a thing of beauty and elegance. So he consciously made a mental tag, associating "fire extinguisher" and "chrome." When he started working on Lissage, he was able to call up this memory to produce a true product innovation: the cosmetics industry's first trigger bottle.

Developing the Habit of Tagging

So how do we get into the habit of making mental tags? Sato says that in his role as a designer, his job is to "create new value that hasn't been before," and so he has gotten into the habit of looking at things from different angles. The two most basic ways that he looks at things are from the perspective of the everyday person and that of a creator.

The "everyday" perspective is a generally neutral point of view. If you're in any kind of marketing- or communications-related work, it actually requires a bit of effort to consciously adopt this point of view (that is, when you're not in your natural everyday mode) because you need rid yourself of the preconceptions that come with wanting to communicate something.

Sato's idea of the "creative" perspective is one that tries to look objectively at one's own "everyday" persona. There are actually two creative perspectives. One is the "macro" view that looks at people's activities in terms of history and trends. The other is the "micro" view that zooms in on more personal and psychological motivations.

Some things I've discovered about my everyday mode are that I'm very easily swayed by fast-food advertising, whereas I'm not as concerned about water and energy conservation as my wife says I should be. So I guess you could call this the Homer Simpson point of view. If I look at fast food from a "creative" perspective, I might find that on the macro level, advertising for burgers is ubiquitous and well-photographed, and on the micro level, I have some prehistoric craving for carbs, salt, and fat. The point is, if you try to look at whatever happens to grab your attention from several different angles, you should be able to assign several tags to it.

Sato says he first got into the habit of tagging when he was studying to get into art school. Japanese art school entrance exams had an image association section, in which applicants have to come up with images for abstract concepts, like "sweet" or "drunk." As a high-school student without a stock of visual themes in his mind, Sato found this exercise extremely difficult. His test-prep teacher told the class that everyday life is full of idea sources, and that his students just had to adopt the creative perspective to find them. At first, Sato couldn't relate to this concept, but after daily practice, he found it became second nature.

The only training, Sato writes, is to actively assign tags to the things that strike your eye. Making this effort will gradually build up a storehouse of images in your brain that you can automatically draw upon when needed. Ask yourself, "Why do I like this?" or "Why don't I like this?" and make the words you come up with your tags. Sato finds that it's much easier to identify why you like something than why you don't like it - and that tagging things you don't like is not only great training, but also opens up the possibility of seeing ways in which you might find a way to like what you dislike.

June 27, 2010

One great way to practice and
develop your presentation skills is to create a PowerPoint presentation
explaining someone else’s great ideas. If you feel like you don’t have time to
spend working on your PowerPoint style for fun, maybe you can find a reason to
present relevant expert thinking to people you work with, or even clients. If
you’re serious about raising the level of presentation skills in your
workplace, perhaps you could organize an informal weekly lunch group where members
present to each other.

The other day I re-read a 2008
post by Garr Reynolds,
Brain Rules for PowerPoint & Keynote Presenters, which includes a
PowerPoint deck he created about Dr. John
Medina’s book Brain
Rules. Garr mentions that “Every year it seems a new book
comes out with practical applications for presenters and speakers, even though
it's not a book about presentations at all,” and Brain Rules is one of them. One
of the things I love about Garr Reynold’s blog is the way he focuses on what
makes an enjoyable experience for a presentation audience, and in doing so
draws from a wide range of writers on design, marketing, philosophy, and
psychology. His suggestions on how to create great slides and presentations
really emanate from a solid understanding of how to connect to people.

Garr’s presentation focuses on
three of Dr. Medina’s twelve rules that he finds most relevant to presentation.
I summarize what I took away as the main point of each:

Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain
power. – Most people in a lecture hall or conference room are already in a
static environment not conducive to thinking, so you have to be aware of that
and wake them up. The office or cubicle where you’re preparing your
presentation is another “anti-brain” environment – stepping away from the desk,
moving around, and exercising are going to keep your mind fresh.

Rule #4: People don’t pay
attention to boring things. – You have 10 minutes to grab an audience’s
attention, and then you have to change gears every 10 minutes after that to
keep it. The brain won’t process too much information at once, so you need to
focus on creating a structure around a few big ideas.

Rule #10: Vision trumps all other
senses. – Ditch slides packed with words and data points in favor of simple
ideas backed up by powerful images.

You’ll get a great feel for Garr’s
style by clicking through the presentation in this post. As you explore his blog and book,
and get a sense of his recommendations on slide design and storyboarding, you’ll
see that you don’t have to be a design expert to start building dramatically
better presentations – presentations that will make your bosses and co-workers
look at you in a whole new way.

June 12, 2010

Last Friday afternoon I watched a
really cool video illustration of Dan Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What
Motivates Us. Dan Pink is a former
speechwriter for Al Gore and aide to Labor Secretary Robert Reich who has
become a best-selling writer on, as he puts it, “the changing world of work.”

The idea behind Drive is that workers are more motivated
by Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose than by performance-based financial
incentives. What's interesting is not so much the general idea, but rather the counter-intuitive evidence Pink uses to suggest that in some cases, incentives actually have the opposite effect you would imagine.

Which led me to the blog
of Michael Lebowitz, of Brooklyn digital agency Big Spaceship. You can see the video
there, or at Dan
Pink’s blog, although the easiest thing for you to do is to just watch it
here, and then by all means visit the other blogs I mention.

For students of effective
tweeting, I think it was the WOW that hooked me. I guess I’m a sucker for WOW.
And then, of course, “surprising” is a compelling word choice. “The surprising
truth about what motivates us” seemed a worthwhile thing to look into.

So I clicked on the link, and
about 30 seconds into the video I thought, “WOW. This is really cool.” I’m a
big fan of well-done info-graphics – and this video is an excellent example of
info-graphics in motion.

This whiteboard animation is set
against a portion of a talk given by Pink at the RSA (Royal Society for the Arts), who commissioned
British visual communication agency Cognitive Media to capture it
in cartoon images. Cognitive Media has
done a number of these for the RSA.

Now, here’s the funny thing. I
first watched Dan Pink present his ideas on a YouTube clip of his TED Talk that
Garr Reynolds posted on Presentation
Zen, and then sort of forgot about it. So I went back to Garr’s blog to
check out the original live presentation (which you can see below) and I
actually found it more persuasive than the animated video. That may have been
because it was now the third time I’d absorbed the message (and typically a
person needs to see a message three times before it really sinks in), or
because the live presentation is more complete, or simply because a live
presentation delivered well is more effective. It’s worth watching both videos
a few times, and visiting the post on Presentation Zen will provide some
additional perspective.

I think what it comes down to is
that great info-graphics can play a powerful role in sparking interest and
giving us a panoramic view of complex ideas, but that inevitably we need to go
to the source.

June 10, 2010

What are some of the common
practices behind successful branded Facebook pages? Frederic Baffou, a former Philip Morris exec who blogs on marketing at Customer Centric, is writing a three-part series this month on
social media marketing.

In the first article,
Baffou reports on results of following eight brands’ Facebook pages over a
three-month period.While it’s not
exactly a scientific sample, I personally think we can learn a lot from
disciplined observation of smaller data sets. Here are some of his interesting
findings:

Brands usually post less than
once per day regardless of the product category and size of their fan base.

58% of posts fall into three main
categories.

Luxury brands tend to focus on
sponsored events.

Specialty brands tend to focus on
new product information and online sales.

What do we get from this? Once
again, we’re seeing the importance of maintaining consistency: specifically,
maintaining a consistent schedule and focusing on core ideas.

May 28, 2010

Michael Gass’ Fuel Lines is another one of my
current favorite blogs. Michael Gass is an advertising agency new business
consultant who specializes in advising small- to medium-sized agencies, and he
uses his blog to evangelize for social media as a powerful tool for growing
agency business. As director of business development for Catapult, a medium-sized Silicon Valley
agency focused on digital, direct, and content marketing, I find Fuel Lines
incredibly stimulating.

The heart of all agency social
media activities, according to Gass, is the agency blog. He recommends that the
agency blog be kept separate from the official agency website. The blog is not
the place to plug your business – that’s the role of the agency website – but
rather a place to engage your
audience in discussions of broader marketing
subjects that matter most to them. If people are attracted to your point of
view as an agency principal, some will naturally gravitate towards your agency
when the time is right.

Gass is a prolific blogger – and
his intelligent strategy of consistently redistributing older posts via Twitter
rather than letting them disappear in the archives of his blog makes him seem
even more prolific. Nevertheless, even Gass occasionally has to deal with
writer’s block. In Overcoming
Social Media Writer’s Block, Gass offers some practical tips on keeping
your blog posts coming. “Most importantly,” he notes, “It is not [what] I want to write about. I have
to write about what my audience wants to read.”

Focus on your audience is the key
to all successful communications, whether we are talking about advertising, blogging,
or presentations. If you read Garr Reynold’s blog or book, Presentation
Zen, you will certainly pick up on his exhortations to focus on the “particular situation and audience.” Advertising
agencies constantly struggle with clients who are overly focused on what they
want to communicate rather than what is relevant (about their product or
service) to the audience. It’s always a delicate balancing act. We don’t go out
to make advertising, presentations, or even blogs without wanting to say something.
But communication is about connecting, and one-sided monologues don’t connect.

If you have the time and
inclination, it’s always interesting and instructive to read a favorite blog
from beginning to end. The practice provides valuable insight into the ways
blogs evolve and develop character over time. The hardest thing about writing a
blog is maintaining the discipline and self-confidence to keep it going, so it’s
useful to see how others have maintained their pace. And since you will usually
find that blogs improve over time, it’s encouraging in the early stages as you
develop your own pace. Like exercise, it’s important to maintain discipline,
even doing just a little at a time and making gradual progress.

I thought Garr’s third post – PowerPoint
abuse in Japan: we can learn a lot from the Japanese bento – was particularly
compelling. It tells the story of the insight he had on a train
enjoying a simple
Japanese box lunch, then looking across the aisle at a salaryman reading through a bad PowerPoint presentation crammed with
text. The experience became the impetus for his book,
where he notes: “The Japanese bento contains appropriate content arranged in the
most efficient, graceful manner. The bento is presented in a simple, beautiful,
and balanced way. Nothing lacking. Nothing superfluous. Not decorated, but
wonderfully designed. … When was the last time you could say the same for a
presentation?”

I’ve been a big bento fan since
first visiting Japan in 1989, and living in Tokyo for six years during the 90s.
The idea that even at a 7-11, you can get a simple, tasty, nicely arranged, and
nutritious meal for $3, always struck me as one of the things that set Japan
apart. When I worked at the Japanese ad agency Dentsu, enjoying a box lunch
was one of those “moments of Zen” that created an oasis of calm amidst the
chaos and clutter of my office environment.

Garr goes into more depth in his
book about the way bento are constructed and how the various elements create
nutritional as well as aesthetic balance, and makes some observations of how
the principles of “presentation” in a good bento can carry over into slide presentations.
One of the things I admire about Garr is that he demonstrates a genuine appreciation
and knowledge of Zen aesthetics and presents them in an instructive and
unpretentious manner. So, I hope he doesn’t mind my frequent links to his blog
as my own way of processing and sharing his insights.

May 16, 2010

Over the past few months, I’ve
found myself returning again and again to Garr Reynold’s blog Presentation Zen.
A friend at Duarte Design recommended I read his book, also titled Presentation
Zen. If you have to make and give presentations, and most of us do, Garr
Reynolds is an amazing
source of wisdom and practical advice.

Being in
advertising, presentation is part of daily life for me. I’ve sat through my
share of mind-numbing presentations consisting of slide after slide crammed
with too much data and too many bullet points. And while I’ve always struggled
to keep my slides simple, it’s always been, well, a struggle. Experiencing Garr’s
extremely minimalist approach really made the scales fall from my eyes.

Garr’s signature presentation
style makes use of quality images displayed full-bleed or
elegantly layered against a dark background, with very few words employed to
make the most fundamental point. The basic idea is: one slide, one point. At
first I thought his approach was more appropriate for lecture-style
presentations, in which the presenter is performing in front of a larger audience,
and that it wouldn’t work in real-world client meetings.

However, after a few
months of progressively peeling away the layers of information in my slides, I
had an opportunity to create a presentation on content marketing and social
media, and decided to go for broke. I was
pleasantly surprised by the results and the positive energy in the room.

Most of us go into a presentation
in a defensive mode, expecting that our audience wants to see rock-solid proof of
every point we plan to make, or an irrefutable chain of logic. And the result
is … slide after slide crammed with too much data and too many bullet points. I
think the value that Garr brings is in demonstrating that if we can let go of our
fears, stop hiding behind our slides and step out in front of them, using them
to illustrate and emphasize what we want to communicate, we will all be more
effective presenters.

It takes discipline to capture
one simple idea on each slide and to rely on our own mastery of a subject to
furnish the fuel for our talk. It means we have to know what we’re talking
about and have the confidence not to read off the screen. So, for anyone who
labors over the order of their bullet points, I recommend losing the bullet
points and reading Garr’s book and blog.